The lead counsel for Endsars petitioners, Adeshina Ogunlana, has voiced his disagreement with the Lagos State Government’s stance on a leaked memo approving the mass burial of 103 EndSARS victims.
The memo, which surfaced on social media on Sunday, suggested that the state government had approved N61,285,000 for the mass burial of 103 individuals identified as victims of the 2020 EndSARS protests, causing significant public outcry.
In response to the leaked memo, the Lagos State Government clarified that those scheduled for the mass burial were not victims of the infamous Lekki Tollgate shooting.
During an appearance on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, Ogunlana criticized the state government’s explanation, stating it was being “clever by half.”
He said, “The government is being clever by half and they are not telling the absolute truth. Yes, I agree with the position that the 103 bodies were said, not all of them were picked up from the Lekki toll gate and its environs.
“To use the word the pathologist used at the panel, that is Professor Obafunwa, he said bodies were scavenged, and corpses were picked from different places. But around the area of Lekki Toll Gate, they were corpses too, some of them were dumped at the General Hospital, Lagos Island and all that.
“For the government now to be saying oh no there is no named citizen, the question I want to ask them is this, even the 103 corpses that they want to dispose of, do they have any names? There was no name.
“The bodies that were taken around the environment of Lekki toll gate when Baba Fafunwa was speaking, he at least identified three that were perforated with missiles.
“People saying that the 103 is proof that actually 103 people were killed at the Lekki toll gate is a very grave error and I will not join anybody saying that.
“But to say that there was no body recovered in the environs of the Lekki toll gate incident of 2020 is completely wrong,” he said.
Ogunlana asserted that government was attempting to “profit from the cruel loss of lives” by approving as much as over N60 million for the mass burial.
He added, “Even now the system of government that we have in Lagos State and by extension Nigeria is showing that they want to profit by cruel loss of lives.
“How could you say that you have approved N61 million to bury 103 degraded bodies in a mass grave? People that are unidentified, people that nobody came up to claim and all that, I mean that is horrendous.”
